ZFS License and Future

[krad]

On 5 November 2010 22:19, Alejandro Imass <ait at p2ee.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 08:25:05PM +0100, Svein Skogen (Listmail account)
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Well ... CDDL was (iirc) based on the Mozilla Public License. Are you
> >> similarly worried about Thunderbird or Firefox?
> >
> > I think Alejandro's more worried about what will happen with future
> > versions of ZFS based on the company that now owns the copyrights, which
> > is not (in any meaningful way I've been able to determine) at all similar
> > to the Mozilla Foundation.  Yes, the current stable version is CDDL.
> > Will the next be purely proprietary, or some new license, or simply
> > discontinued?  Will Oracle start using patent suits to try to stop people
> > who aren't paying for ZFS or who are using it on platforms other than
> > Solaris from using it?
> >
> > Whether you think concerns like these will prove reasonable in the long
> > run, they make a lot more sense than assuming that Alejandro just wonders
> > if the CDDL is "dangerous" somehow.
> >
>
> Precisely. This is Larry Ellison's position on Open Source:
>
> <quote>
> If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it.
> [...] So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a
> company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our
> products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is
> not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once
> open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. [...]
> We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.
> </quote>
> Source: Financial Times interview, 18-Apr-2006
> http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713
>
> I am not about to check the actual licensing of ZFS, I mean to which
> parts are actually licensed with the CDDL or not, for example the HTML
> error message documents. Which patents Sun or Oracle have obtained on
> the technology, etc. Look at what happened to Android for choosing
> Java. Supposedly, it was Open Source and there you have it: it's open
> source if and only if... For example, WyTF do I have to login to
> Oracle to access the error message information?
>
> So, my inquiry to this community is: should we really be promoting the
> use of ZFS directly by putting it on the FBSD handbook? Maybe it
> should go on a different document, and make it really optional. MySQL
> is another example, and Open Office, and to top it off BDB. Yes, it's
> "Oracle Berkeley DB" - are we as a community continue to allow, and
> worse yet promote, this trend?
>
> Anyway, I'm not going to use it any more. I think that we have to
> raise awareness to Companies that create Open Source not sell
> themselves out to these vicious looters. Or at least have the decency
> to release one final version under a license that will allow the
> communities to continue development and keeping the software really
> open.
>
> Best,
> Alejandro Imass
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "
> freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>


this thread shouldnt be limited to just zfs really, dtrace is also affected
by all the same licensing issues